CULTURE WARS

Kicked Out for Supporting Female Priests?

Pope Francis excommunicated an Australian priest and advocate for women’s ordination last week. Officially, the reason for the Rev. Greg Reynolds’s removal is that he had thrown away the consecrated host or retained it “for a sacrilegious purpose,” but Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart made it clear that Reynolds’s activism played a large role. “The decision by Pope Francis to dismiss Fr. Reynolds from the clerical state and to declare his automatic excommunication has been made because of his public teaching on the ordination of women contrary to the teaching of the Church,” Hart wrote in a letter to his archdiocese. According to the National Catholic Reporter, Reynolds believes that his activism in support of same-sex marriage may have also been a factor.